Sarah van Gelder talks with theologian Walter Brueggeman an inspiration to The Economics of Compassion Initiative, a new interfaith effort in Cincinnati leading a citywide exploration of alternative economies “in which workers and owners share benefit, in which the community is enhanced and not harmed … marked by justice, community and relationship.” They discuss religion, empire, the economy, and social justice.

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Thought Leader

Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades, known throughout the world for his method of combining literary and sociological modes when reading The Bible. He has written more than 58 books, hundreds of articles, and several commentaries on books of the Bible, has contributed to the Living the Questions DVD series, and participated in Bill Moyers’ PBS television series on Genesis.

Though the commons is everywhere, it is nonetheless little noticed. For economists, it is a kind of inchoate mass that awaits the vivifying hand of the market to attain life. Forests are worthless until they become timber, just as quiet is worthless until it becomes advertising.

Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth

Our communities are broken. For the ones that look whole, the price is being born somewhere else.

Jim Keene

Education is never neutral. It always involves a project…either keep things the same or change them.

Paolo Friere

Revolution is not capturing institutions, it is discovering free space and enlarging it.

Paul Goodman

If your time hasn’t come, not even a doctor can kill you.

Meyer A Perlstein

Leadership is willingness to have faith in a future we do not understand.

Clint Kemp

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

Italian Proverb

If I am ever stuck on a respirator or life support system, I definitely want to be unplugged-but not until I get down to a size eight.

Henriette Mantel

The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

Joseph Joubert

Lost luggage is an initiation ritual. It is an invitation to a simpler life.

Madeline Nold

The power to call people a problem is the most injurious thing you can do.

John McKnight

Questions are fateful. They determine destinations. They are the chamber through which destiny calls.

Godwin Hlatshwayo

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Adrienne Rich

All consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.

Carl Jung

Every time you add a highway lane, you slow down traffic.

Bross’s paradox

When we meet, I am talking to myself and you are spying on me.

Leroy

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.

Henry Miller

I fear one day I’ll meet God, he’ll sneeze, and I won’t know what to say.

Ronnie Shakes

Most communities can be compared to a football game where 30,000 people who need the exercise turn up to watch 36 people who don’t.